


swimming in the eighth month

by o666666



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-Season/Series 11
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:54:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22775962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/o666666/pseuds/o666666
Summary: Sometimes, in 25 years, you forget that your wife is the same little weirdo you took to Oregon and cracked up with at the rain.Mulder takes Scully swimming to ease her pregnancy aches.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 4
Kudos: 68





	swimming in the eighth month

There is a pond on their property. (“ _Adjacent_ ” to their property, she tells him.) He proposes they swim.

“Mulder,” she says at first, “no.”

But he gets her in the end. “Come on, Scully. Jackson’s been swimming in it all summer with the dog. It’s fine.”

“Amoebiasis, Mulder. _Cholera_.”

He gives her a look.

She moves to stand up from the couch and winces, bracing herself on the arm.

“Back?” he asks her, and she nods. It’s been horrible lately for Scully, so hard on her hips and back. She waddles around cringing most of the time. Mulder and Jackson wait on her hand and foot, to her great embarrassment. The third trimester crawls.

He helps her up with a hand on each of her elbows. Her fists clench when her weight shifts. It hurts him to see her hurting.

The pregnancy in its entirety has been difficult. Perhaps the physical pains of the third trimester pale in comparison to the trauma of the first. Scully had been sick for weeks, anxious as he’d ever seen her, losing weight. It had shocked him at first—how much she really, really needed him. To her great embarrassment they waited on her, yes, but without them… she would go without. Scully couldn’t move the big trash cans to the end of the drive or carry the white wooden rocking chair upstairs. She couldn’t get her own Ginger Ale when she was sick on the bathroom floor.

 _What did she do the first time_ , he’d thought to himself so many times over the past eight months. _What did she do the first time. What the_ hell _was I doing the first time._

He holds her against him and presses down at the base of her spine until she sighs. “Swim with me,” he tries again.

-

Sometimes, in 25 years, you forget that your wife is the same little weirdo you took to Oregon and cracked up with at the rain.

The Scully who decends the stairs in goggles and a maternity bathing suit is deeply the Scully of puffy bangs and puffy tricolor coats.

When she gets to the bottom of the stairs she wraps her arms around his neck, his height, for once, with two steps left to go. She kisses his nose. With her belly between them, they look like a slow dance. He leans in, kisses her ear and whispers.

“Did you forget your flippers?”

-

Mulder holds the goggles up around his arm because Scully is his woman, and when she no longer needs her things, he holds them.

Scully floats on her back. “You don’t have to hold on to me,” she instructs, but oh yes he does.

“Your ass feels nice,” he offers, and snaps the elastic of her swimsuit there just a little. His other hand supports her completely, up by her scapulae. He tries, often, to belie the seriousness with which he guards her, wants to prove himself to her even still. Especially still.

They’ve been a guilty pair, the two of them, since this baby.

“What are you thinking today?” he asks.

“Still Iris.”

“No more Elizabeth?”

“Mm.”

Once, in a pool in Arizona, she floated just like this. Her hair was so long it touched him where he stood, wrapped around one of his wrists.

“Mary Margaret?”

“I still like that one,” she says.

“We’ll know when we meet her.”

Scully smiles like she does when she first wakes up sometimes, and her eyes are still closed. Her tummy lumps up out of the water like a little island. (Maroon him for life.)

He starts to swirl her in a big circle. “My parents considered _Everett_ for me.”

She sits up and laughs, dunking herself immediately. When she surfaces she mimics Jackson, giving him a squinty look: “You are _so_ white.”

He puts her goggles on and sticks his tongue out.

She splish splashes around her as if noticing where they are for the first time. “This is a dirty pond, Mulder.” She does have a pine needle stuck to her cheek.

“C’mere.” He brushes it off. He takes her in his arms and walks them around on bent, zero gravity legs, her back to his front. “We’re in the south of France, Scully. Isn’t it nice?”

“It’s pronounced Nice, actually.”

He splashes her.

She kisses the wet hair on his chest, the closest part she can reach. “My back feels better.”

-

He’s lugging her back to the bank. She feels slow and cumbersome. “I’m old and fat,” she tells him when he wraps her up in a towel. He’d helped her through the mud. They kept sliding in their bare feet.

“That’s funny, Scully.” He wraps an arm around her, slinging his own towel over his shoulder. “Just a little while ago I was thinking that you are just exactly like when we first met.”

She stops walking. Grass sticks to her wet legs. “I am not.” She hates to remember that she was ever naive.

“Yes you are.” He smushes a kiss to her temple. A field away, Daggoo runs back and forth from one side of the porch to the other. “Only now you’ve had two of my babies and live in my house, and _I_ draw _your_ baths.”

“Will you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He waggles his eyebrows.

She pokes him. “You’re very different,” she says. “Now you know a come on when you see one.”


End file.
